Raising historic vessels to museum status

Despite the ambitious nature of the proposal to raise selected parts of the Monitor, the project will not be the largest of its kind if it is undertaken.

Both Sweden and England have raised historic vessels in their entirety over the past 40 years, with the 17th-century Swedish sailing ship Vasa - at 226 feet long and 1,210 tons - still ranking as the largest single archaeologist artifact that has ever been recovered and preserved.

Both projects cost tens of millions of dollars, but the exact bill can not be determined because of the large amounts of donated equipment, material and volunteer labor. The vessels are now on display in national museums that attract thousands of visitors each year.

The Monitor project should also be compared to the raising of the Union ironclad gunboat Cairo near Vicksburg, Miss., during the 1960s. The well-intended, mostly volunteer effort turned into a disaster, one nautical archaeologist says, when the lifting cables cut through the hull of the ship like "wires slicing through cheese."

Here are some facts and figures comparing these projects with the Monitor proposal:

MONITOR

Length - 173 feet

Width - 41 feet, 4 inches

Weight - 973 tons total (126 tons for the turret, the largest object to be recovered)

Location - Open ocean (16 miles off Cape Hatteras)

Water depth - 220 feet

Visibility - 30 to 40 feet

Recovery method - Selective dismantling

Project length - 18 weeks of sea time, followed by at least 6 years of conservation